What a waste of time and effort. You want people to respect IP, then how about giving users the ability to use content in novel ways without being charged repeatedly for the same content over and over again, or how about realizing it's a world economy and ditch the ridiculous geographic restrictions and content delivery restrictions.

Sadly our government paid off by lobbyists for these industries just keeps giving more rights to the IP holders at the expense of the public.

It's ironic that America is one of the most draconian enforcer of IP, given that in the past Americans had no qualms with stealing technology from Britain and Germany when they were technologically behind.

This sort of craziness is one of the biggest reasons that the US has such bad PR problems in other countries. If you send you "Copyright Czar" (funniest title ever) to Canada to demand we change our copyright laws to be more in line with your draconian and absurd copyright laws you're only eating away at good will.

Given the sorts of 'contractors' who suddenly start crawling around US embassies when we really get serious about ensuring that the locals make the right choices on important issues, I'd say we've gotten off lightly this time...

And I just went on every one of those FB Pages to leave a Comment.All of you should do the same thing and spread the word so it goes Streisland.I did see Ars Cyrus there as well leaving comments on all those pages.Thank You Cyrus for taking the time out !

hmmm, just looked this up: according to the labor dept, just over 400,000 people were employed by the movie and record industry in march. US population is over 300 million. so a third of our GDP goes to... about 1.3 percent of the population.

It's ironic that America is one of the most draconian enforcer of IP, given that in the past Americans had no qualms with stealing technology from Britain and Germany when they were technologically behind.

hmmm, just looked this up: according to the labor dept, just over 400,000 people were employed by the movie and record industry in march. US population is over 300 million. so a third of our GDP goes to... about 1.3 percent of the population.

So... yea.

The problem is that 'IP' is a vague term. An 'IP industry' for their purposes is one that has a copyright, patent, trademark, and possibly a few other things. Trademark makes up the biggest portion by quit a margin, so it's saying that a third of our GDP comes from businesses with names.

"As ridiculous as it was when the American ambassador to Australia spoke out against Aussies pirating Game of Thrones this week, "

Hey Cyrus. Do some research ffs. It's real hard, I know, but it can pay off.

From the Wikipedia entry for "Ambassador":

Support Prosperity

Another result of the increase in foreign travel is the growth of trade between nations. For most countries, the national economy is now part of the global economy. This means increased opportunities to sell and trade with other nations. When two nations are conducting a trade, it is usually advantageous to both parties to have an ambassador and perhaps a small staff living in the other land, where they act as an intermediary between cooperative businesses.[5][4]